Just like the flowers I am growing wild

[austin_dern]

Another day, another job rejection. This was an ugly one from my point of view: my father noticed a position at a nearby community college, just one year and slightly underpaying but also potentially tenure-track (I'm not sure that I'd want to be tenure-track at a small community college, but it would surely be a better place to negotiate contracts from elsewhere), posted a couple weeks ago and with a deadline ... that day, actually, and it was already past the close-of-business. So I did the best I could, and e-mailed the department contact with my introduction, apologies, and attachments of my CV and my American Mathematical Society cover sheet. The next day I got the response: since my materials were not received by the deadline I was ineligible for this position but do please continue checking for future job postings.

At the risk of declaring them sour grapes, if they're that hung up on a deadline that they can't take being a couple of hours late with the initial application they're probably stuffed to the gills with unreasonable and arbitrary rules and would drive me crazy to work at anyway. (I may be spoiled by my experience in Singapore, admittedly, where a reasonable bit of looseness about deadlines is forgiven as inevitable human failings. I'm not joking or being sarcastic about this: except for fast-food coupons I was never denied something just because I was a reasonable little bit past a deadline.)

But as one job that wasn't open to me gets closed off, another job that I won't get appears: my thesis advisor sent me a note about an adjunct position available at a college in the Hudson Valley. It's just for one term -- with a possibility for a second -- and I don't know that it'd be worth it financially to take a position like that which would carry me out of realistic range for my well-paid extruded office product, but it would be nice to be back to a job where I understood what it was I was being paid for.

Trivia: Architect Ithiel Town built the Connecticut State Capitol on New Haven Green from 1827 to 1831. The building, a replica of the Parthenon, was demolished in 1889. Source: Yankee Science in the Making, Dirk J Struik.

Currently Reading: Biting The Sun, Tanith Lee. I had thought this would be a decades-later written sequel to Don't Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, but it turns out to be a reprinting of those two books under a single cover. That's not a bad thing as it's been close to a decade since I read either, but it was a surprise when I started reading.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when places have a job they want to fill with a particular internal applicant, they'll advertise it in a way that just barely meets the minimum requirements for being able to say that they posted it and complied with whatever hiring rules they have. I wonder if that's what happened here.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That could be. In this case the job was posted for about ten days total; I just had the bad luck to see it too late.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Community college jobs are strangely hard to get. I've never been interviewed for one and I've applied for dozens. I suspect they always go to insiders, e.g. adjuncts who have been grinding there for years. I'd take one -- I hear they tend to pay very well.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This one was listed as paying -- well, slightly better than I was getting in Singapore (not counting the housing allotment), but I was underpaid there. (The benefit of never running out of interesting stuff for my Livejournal, and the lower cost of food, made up for much of that.)

But I haven't been an adjunct for them before and if they're going to be that fussy about being a few hours late they probably weren't cut out for me.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I mean that the tenure-track jobs at community colleges pay well. The adjunct jobs usually pay pretty badly. The worst I ever had was at Jackson Community College in Jackson, MI. Not only was it one of the worst teaching experiences I've ever had, but it paid $1350 a course -- a little more than half the going rate at local CCs. JCC is a really poor school because the voters there have not passed a millage for it for something like ten years. They had to close the Michigan Space Center a few years ago because they didn't have the money to run it.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

This was a tenure-track spot locally. I haven't looked seriously at adjunct positions for community colleges since ... well, even the fair-sized schools pay just well enough to starve on. Not as bad as Jackson Community College, but I imagine the cost of living is a touch higher in central New Jersey, too.

I didn't realize the Michigan Space Center was connected to a community college. I'd assumed it existed in that state level of bureaucracy and existence.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Another note: community colleges are the worst for bureaucracy. It doesn't surprise me at all that they rejected you for being a few hours late. That's the kind of hoop-jumping their HR people always require. They always require irritating applications too, the kind where you have to list your job and pay history as though you were applying for a clerical position or something.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's got to be some kind of overcompensation for the low prestige community colleges are able to command. A place that's made it onto the Top 100 In The World rankings is more relaxed about its customs.